Well, this is unexpected. The iPhone 4G saga just got a whole lot crazier - dare I say it, a whole lot more ridiculous. Have you ever reported anything like a phone or something similarly small stolen to the police? What was their reaction? Did you ever get the device back? Did they send an army of officers to get your device back? No? Odd. They raided Jason Chen's house, and took four computers and two servers. Update: And thus our true colours reveal. "The raid that San Mateo area cops conducted last week on the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen came at the behest of a special multi-agency task force that was commissioned to work with the computer industry to tackle high-tech crimes. And Apple Inc. sits on the task force's steering committee." Update II: According to TechCrunch, the investigation has been put on hold while the DA ponders Gizmodo's shield defence. Update III: Some legal insight from a constitutional law and first amendment expert and a law professor. The gist? The DA has said no one has been charged with anything here, making this just an investigation - however, this makes the search and seizing of material worse. "If the police are literally just gathering information, with no suspect targeted yet, then a subpoena against a journalist would have probably been smarter than a search warranted that resulted in the front door of Chen's home being bashed in."

Ah but here's where you are wrong. According to Gizmodo's own article, the guy who "found" the phone in the bar did not tell the bartender or owner of the bar that he had found said phone, he just took the phone home with him and kept it/played with it for a week or so until he sold it to Gizmodo. This is where the story falls apart and where the legal problems begin. When you find someone's keys on the floor of a bar you give them to the bartender or at the very least you tell him you found them so that when the owner notices he's lost them and asks the bartender if anyone has found any keys they can be returned. This is basic common sense, people! The fact that the "unknown person" did not do any of this turns the whole incident into theft and by that makes Gizmodo complicit in the theft when they bought the phone later on.

Do we even know what this alleged person said to Apple? It could have been something along the lines of "If you want your phone back I want $10,000." For which Apple says screw you and locks the phone instead. Not having received anything from Apple he then goes on to contact tech blogs interested in pics and actually got a sucker to buy the device. In-fact that seems about the gist of it to me. If he was really serious about returning it Apple he would have dropped it off at a police station or dropped it in a Fedex box and shipped it to Apple. Blackmailing Apple for the return of the device (as I'm inclined to think is what happened) does not constitute contacting Apple, imo. Its like someone (and this does happen)keeping your wallet or phone at ransom if you don;t pay them compensation. You as the person who lost said object are not obligated to do so and can report whoever contacted as a thief if your stuff is not returned to you.